


Red-Handed

by Storycat9



Series: Wide Binary Orbit [2]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angry Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Angst and Feels, F/M, Pining, Post-Devil Face Reveal to Chloe Decker, Post-Season/Series 03 AU, Trixie Expinoza needs adults to get over themselves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:39:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storycat9/pseuds/Storycat9
Summary: The Devil is not in the habit of forgiveness.Returning to the LAPD is not the same as forgiving the Detective. While he wouldn’t admit it to himself or Dr. Linda, Lucifer knows that working with the Detective also allows him to see to her punishment.
Relationships: Chloe Decker & Lucifer Morningstar, Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Eve/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Trixie Espinoza & Lucifer Morningstar
Series: Wide Binary Orbit [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979053
Comments: 35
Kudos: 185
Collections: LUCIFER_FICS_





	Red-Handed

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! So I've decided that what started with "Gift Exchange" should really be a series of stand-alone but connected episodes instead of a single narrative. But these are all still in the AU in which Chloe and Eve are becoming tentative friends, which throws the dynamics of Season 4 a bit for a loop. 
> 
> As far as timeline, this would happen after "Devil Is as Devil Does" and before "Save Lucifer," but "Super-Bad Boyfriend" doesn't exist at this point.

The Devil is not in the habit of forgiveness.

Trying it on feels like putting on a suit from a new designer; he tests the look, thinking from time to time that he likes the feel of it but not yet sure he can really pull it off. 

Returning to the LAPD is not the same as forgiving the Detective for her betrayal, regardless of whether she decided against sending him back to Hell in the end. It merely acknowledges that he enjoys catching bad guys, and the Detective has shown she can be a good work partner, throwing herself over his injured body to protect him when she thought a bomb was about to go off at Lux. 

While he wouldn’t admit it to himself or the endlessly inquisitive Dr. Linda, Lucifer knows that working with the Detective also allows him to see to her punishment. He and Eve have enjoyed more than a month of sex guaranteed to ensure a dreamless sleep and then some, but too often he still wakes in the small hours of the night after reliving his confrontation with the Detective in the penthouse. He’s remembered, over and over, Chloe’s face crumpled in fear--the one thing she’d assured him she’d never feel for him. Her _terror_ at his rage and his Devil-face is truly unforgivable.

Besides, the Devil punishes like breathing, savors poetic justice like fine wine. He doesn’t consciously intend to start forgetting the Detective’s favorite lemon bars when he brings in donuts for the office. And of course it’s only polite that he immediately responds to every romantic or outright obscene text message from his gorgeous, adoring new girlfriend ( _See what a good boyfriend I am?_ ) even when the Detective is in the middle of talking to him. When she calls him out on it, Lucifer apologizes with an almost unnoticeable tone that he’s humoring her.

_(Enjoy being only wanted for work?)_

He delves into the most colorful details of his rejuvenated sex life at the office, from a late-night quickie in an aquarium touch-pool to a three-day orgy with the entire cast of Cirque du Soleil. He’s always enjoyed trying to make the Detective squirm or get irritated, but now he enjoys the ever-so-delicate sadism of describing both over-the-top romantic gestures and wildly adventurous sexcapades in front of her. He never tries to tell the Detective directly, but instead plays to the obliviously eager Miss Lopez as his audience. 

The Detective doesn’t even need to be looking at him; he can hear her teeth grind behind a tight smile. And his playboy exhibitionist history gives all the cover he needs to meet her gaze with cheerful obtuseness.

_(See what you could have had if you’d been braver?)_

During these little wound-salting exercises, Lucifer still finds himself tracking the slight hitch of a breath whenever he randomly hits upon some act she must keep in her own dirty little fantasy drawer. Taking Eve on the lid of his piano; bringing Eve breakfast in bed before making her _his_ breakfast in bed; these little details crack the Detective’s shield of businesslike indifference.

Unfortunately, he finds them a bit of a double-edged sword. He’s stumbling upon all the Detective’s desires that he never could have mojo’ed out of her, and each one resurfaces in the small hours of the night, while he holds his girlfriend and tries not to imagine a different woman in his bed. 

Worse, while at first he could revel in his little slights, as the weeks go by he starts to feel vaguely unsettled by her acceptance of them. The Detective deliberately gives him the benefit of the doubt when he drops some ambiguously cutting remark. She actively backs away from competing with Eve in any way and complements her to Lucifer. She works to prove herself as his work partner as diligently as she tackles paperwork--which she no longer tries to wheedle his help with. 

In fact, Lucifer slowly realizes that she no longer asks for his help with anything personal. Dark circles smudge her eyes, a low constant tension runs through her, but she offers no explanations and the gnashing, petty thing inside himself won’t ask. She resets to the earliest days of their partnership, seeming pleased but always a little surprised to see him show up at work. 

The Detective appreciates his friendship, but no longer expects anything else from him. He tells himself she should expect nothing else.

* * *

Lucifer spots the urchin as he comes into the bullpen, sitting at her mother’s desk with her head bowed over homework and the Detective’s own little frown of concentration on her elfin face. Some child-sense makes her look up as he reaches the last step, and Lucifer’s chest gives a funny twinge at the huge grin that lights Trixie’s face. He has just enough time to brace before she jumps up and barrels into him, locking her arms around his waist.

“Lucifer! I missed you! Are you coming, too?”

He pats her head awkwardly, realizing it comes up higher on his chest than it used to; Trixie’s hit a growth spurt somewhere in the last few months, while he’s been too busy with Eve at Lux to come to any game nights or movie marathons. He can’t remember the last time the Detective asked him to pick Trixie up from school.

“Coming where, Spawn? Are we sneaking into a school again?” 

Trixie grins at the reminder of the time he used her as a fake daughter for undercover work at an elite private school. “No, silly; we’re going to the pier to ride the Ferris wheel and get ice cream!”

“Wha-?”

The Detective steps out of Miss Lopez’s lab at that moment and walks over to rescue him. “Trixie’s school is having a teachers-only day for training or something,” she says, briskly unwrapping the child’s sticky arms from his Prada jacket. “I finished the reports for the Bingley and Wallace cases this morning, and nothing new has dropped, so I’m taking the afternoon off to take Trix out to the Santa Monica pier. I texted you …”

Lucifer pulls out his phone and scrolls up through the new messages to find one from the Detective around 10 a.m., telling him he didn’t need to come in. It had been lost amid a dozen or so texts from Eve, excitedly relaying her plans to meet Maze to get new equipment for the next themed orgy on Saturday. 

Lucifer feels a little sore already, thinking about it.

“So are you coming with us?” Trixie asks again, and the Detective shoots him an apologetic look over her urchin’s head.

“Oh, Trix, Lucifer has a whole other job on top of helping the police,” she says. _Helping the police, not her,_ he thinks. “He’s really busy …”

“Not at all, Detective! It’s a beautiful day for a stroll along the boardwalk--if I’m welcome to join.” He shoots her a playful smirk.

“Of course, you’re always welcome.” The Detective smiles, sudden and brilliant, in return. Lucifer hasn’t seen that smile since before Cain’s death--since before Cain first appeared, really--and for a moment a steel band in his chest loosens with painful relief, before tightening into numbness again.

“Well, then.” He offers an arm to Trixie. “Shall we?

* * *

Visiting a touch-pool is distinctly different during the day, Lucifer thinks; in the aquarium under the pier there are piles more grubby-fingered children and no nudity to speak of. He tries to hug the wall farthest from the touch-pool scrum, only to be dragged over by Beatrice. 

“Look, it’s me!” she announces with a mischievous grin. “Hold out your hand.”

“Pardon?” he says, baffled, and Trixie scoops up a spiky ball from the water and dumps it into his cupped hand. 

“See, it’s an _urchin_!” she says, then laughs maniacally--either at her own joke or his disgusted look, he can’t tell. The creature moves a spike or two, dripping sea water onto his pants, and Lucifer hastily plops it back into the water. “Yes, I certainly feel the resemblance between you,” he responds.

The Detective smothers a grin. “Sorry, Lucifer. I’ll pay for dry-cleaning, I promise,” she says, handing him a wad of paper napkins. 

He waves her off, his own lips quirking a little. “It’s hardly the first suit sacrificed since I met you, Detective. Or the tenth, for that matter.”

The three of them wander through the aquarium, peering through the floor view port to rays in the water underneath them and watching a demonstration of a red octopus working its way through a maze. The little urchin gets into a highly animated conversation with an aquarium volunteer about the intelligence of cephalopods, and Lucifer thinks Behemoth would be pleased with her praise. The Grand Demon of the Deep had been tasked with designing squid and jellyfish before the Fall and continued to have a thing for tentacles long after.

He’s lost in thought when Beatrice hauls her mother over to a different exhibit and the volunteer gives him a big smile. “You must be really proud--”

“As well I should be,” he answers, preening a little. 

But the volunteer goes on. “Your daughter is so bright, and she really knows her stuff. If she’s interested, you should encourage her to try out for our junior scientist program when she hits middle school.” 

“I _beg_ your pardon? She’s- she’s not--” he blusters, but the volunteer has already turned to pull a pamphlet on the program from a drawer under the octopus’s tank. She hands it to the gobsmacked Devil just as the next little cluster of children converge on the octopus.

He’s still sputtering when he hears a muffled snort behind him. The detective has a fist pressed against her mouth, unable to fully cover that oddly endearing cackle of hers. Her eyes shine with laughter. “Oh, _oh_ , your face is _priceless_ ,” she says. “I ought to send a picture to Maze.”

Lucifer frowns indignantly, which only makes her snort. She takes a deep, gulping breath and blows it out, then bumps him companionably with her shoulder. “Oh, come off it. You two have a little of the same coloring, that’s all--and I think she’s picked up your devious expression.”

He wants to deliver some devastating quip but finds the words catch in his throat. He has a sudden, knife-sharp image of how they must have looked; him listening, amused, to a little girl with dark hair and eyes and her mother’s smile. Just a man out with his daughter and wife on a beautiful day.

Just the playboy owner of Lux, out with his work partner and her daughter when he could be planning his next orgy.

Just the bloody King of Hell and the woman who’d flinched at his touch bare months ago. 

Lucifer wants to wonder what the hell he’s doing here. He wants to find this whole afternoon mind-numbingly boring. He wants the Detective’s snorting laugh to not feel like the first sunlight on his shoulders when he escaped to L.A.

When did he stop being able to lie to himself?

He wants the Detective to bump his shoulder with hers again.

“Ha! Your spawn could teach demons about deviousness long before I met her,” he says, rewarded by a smile from the Detective that could rival her daughter’s for mischief. 

Then the urchin comes back and grins up at him. “Come on, Lucifer! Mom said we can go up and ride the carousel next!”

Lucifer refuses the carousel, but lets himself be dragged onto the West Coaster and the Sea Dragon. He gleefully leads the way to the bumper cars, only to be tag-teamed by the Detective and her spawn, who pin him against the side wall. Both giggle madly. The sound warms the splinters of ice that have been in his chest the last few months.

“Pound him, Mom!” Trixie shrieks, shaking her fist in the air. 

Lucifer quirks an eyebrow at her mother and calls, “Normally my role, Detective, but never let it be said I can’t take what I give …”

The Detective chokes, her face turning bright red, and Lucifer laughs out loud, using her distraction to spin his wheel hard to the right, slamming into her car and knocking it away.

“Mooooom!” howls Trixie, trying to block him but catching on her mother’s bumper. 

Lucifer grins and swerves away with the Decker women in pursuit, the Detective’s eyes narrowing with that fierce look she gets when running down a suspect. He leads them both a merry chase, weaving among the other cars as easily as cutting through rush-hour traffic. At last he sees an opening and slams the side of the Detective’s car, spinning her into a rail where her car catches. She blows a strand of hair out of her face and dramatically scowls at him.

“Do you give up?” he calls over.

“Hmm …,” she gives it thought, lowering her head and then looking up at him through her lashes. He catches the faint hint of a dimple as she finishes, “...nope!”

That's when Trixie slams Lucifer from behind, shrieking like a hawk in a dive.

Lucifer hears both of them laughing and feels for a moment like he used to on game nights, as though he has happened upon somewhere warm and safe on a cold night. The Detective’s shining eyes let him forget for a moment what she looked like shivering and terrified.

A loud buzzer sounds, and both the Detective and her spawn bounce out of their cars before he can move. The urchin jumps up and down, pleading, “Ice cream! Can we get ice cream now?”

And the Detective leans over the side of his car and tugs his suit coat a little. “C’mon, I’ll get you a scoop. You took a beating.”

“Hardly,” he huffs, but follows them out just the same.

* * *

His phone rings just as the Detective hands him a hot fudge sundae, and he turns his back and paces a little way off when he sees Eve on the ID. She’s out with Maze, who he can hear in the background, both of them drunk well before the sun is down, and dancing somewhere that’s not Lux by the sound of it.

“How are you, darling?” he says, spooning up hot fudge.

“We got kicked out of a bar!” she squeals excitedly. “Some creepy guy tried to hit on me and Maze threw him across the room, and then his friends came after us, and I hit _two people_ over the head with bottles! You should’ve seen us!”

He laughs. “I certainly hope you took pictures, at least.”

“Oooo, no, but we’re at a totally different bar now; I’m sure we can get in another fight,” Eve says with her perfect, feminine giggle. “Want to meet us?”

“To be sure, darling,” he purrs. “I’m just finishing up here a bit; why don’t you text me when you are heading back to Lux and you can show me all your fierce new moves, hmm?”

Eve makes an absolutely filthy sound of assent, and he hangs up smiling.

Eve returns his equilibrium. Here is his girlfriend, the one who’s up for anything, the one who’s kissed both his faces with equal wantonness and who has spent the day preparing a bacchanal worthy of the King of Desire. He has Eve's warm arms waiting for him and certainly doesn't need anyone else's.

Feeling centered and smug again, he makes the mistake of glancing over at the Detective. She is not looking at him at all, but laughing at Trixie’s face half covered with chocolate ice cream. The child duly scrapes at her mouth with a handful of napkins from her mother and gestures at the Happy Swing, a harness hanging above a giant trampoline. The Detective nods and hands the child several ride tickets, then whoops loudly as Trixie does somersaults and backflips. 

The Detective-- _Chloe_ , his brain whispers--leans against a metal barrier, totally relaxed and smiling. Her hair gleams golden in the late afternoon sun, wisps from her ponytail gently blown across her face and neck by the ocean breeze, and a thin line of gold glints against the back of her neck. 

She makes a little surprised noise that catches his ear as he starts toward her, noticing her own ice cream cone dripping, and casually bends her head to lick the melted vanilla off her hand.

Lucifer’s mouth goes dry. Chloe’s attention stays on her daughter as she unselfconsciously licks long swipes around the edge of her cone to catch the melt. She opens her mouth over the top of the ice cream to lave it into her mouth, and Lucifer hears a happy little hum as her lips close around a bit of it. 

Pulse thudding in his throat, his wrists, his groin, Lucifer watches. He _feels_ every swipe of her tongue, every slow open-mouthed kiss along the side of the treat. He can imagine the contrast between the cold of her tongue and the heat of the rest of her mouth. She eats down enough to begin delicate bites along the edges of the sugar cone and sweat breaks out along the back of his neck.

For weeks he’s wanted to punish her for her rejection, wanted to make her squirm with what she couldn't have. Less than a minute of Chloe relaxed in the sunlight and all his carefully constructed walls are crumbling. He wants her smile. He wants her sea-dark eyes half-closed by pleasure instead of the glare of the sinking sun. He wants her mouth on him. He wants to be a part of every single fantasy she’s ever had, the ones he’s guessed at and the ones he’s never gotten a hint of. He wants her to want him.

 _Bloody hell,_ does he want.

He rakes in a breath, harsh, not realizing how loud it is until the Detective’s head swivels toward him in surprise. Her eyes widen as she takes in his grimace.

“Are you ok? Did you get bad news?”

“Not at all, Detective. All right as rain,” he tries for cool but his voice is pulled over gravel. “Only, I have to get going. I promised to meet Eve back at Lux. …”

He forces a short, sharp chuckle. “Can’t let her plan the orgies on her own, you know.”

And there, _there_ , a flash of pain in her blue eyes before it’s masked with a friendly expression. It's one more point added to the score he's been keeping in his head, but it does nothing to ease his own ache.

“Oh, well … have a good time; tell Eve I said hi,” she says. “And, uh … thanks for coming, Lucifer. It was fun to hang out.”

“Your offspring is quite tolerable, though I’m glad to leave before the sugar rush hits,” he says, and the Detective winces. 

Lucifer wants to take a step back then, but he sees another glint of gold at her throat and finds himself leaning forward instead. “Is that …?” 

His fingertips brush her collarbone a moment as he hooks a fine chain and draws out a little flattened disk from under her blouse. He feels her breath catch under his hand.

“I thought you’d chucked it,” he says flatly.

A slow flush rises up Chloe's throat as she ducks her head. “N-no, of course not. You gave it to me.”

Her hand fists over the bullet defensively, as though she thinks he’s about to rip it off her neck. She bites down on her lower lip and forces herself to meet his eyes again. Hers are over-bright. “I’m sorry, I know I … I mean, we’re still partners and … I didn’t mean to make you angry. I can take it off if you want?”

_(See what you could have had if you’d been braver?)_

When did she find it? When did she start wearing it again? Has it been under there this whole time without him knowing? A painful mix of hope and bitterness flares in his chest before he shoves it down. His hand presses up against hers, the bullet between them.

“No, it’s yours,” he manages with a thin attempt at lightness. “I’m glad you, uh … found it. It matches everything, you know.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs, turning her head slightly and widening her wet eyes a little to help them both hold onto plausible deniability. 

Chloe turns her hand a little over his, lacing their fingers together for a long moment as she pulls them away from the necklace. He steps back and she doesn’t try to stop him. Instead she tucks her necklace back under her blouse and gives him a half-smile. “Goodnight, Lucifer.”

“Goodnight, Detective.”

He strides away without letting himself look back. His hand burns where she touched him. It almost looks red in the vanishing dusk. He wonders which one of them he’s been punishing. 


End file.
